Adsibob

The liquidated damages clause that we have in the contract means that if he misses the deadline, then from that point on, he has to pay my rent and council tax for the rental that we are in. That is not cheap! Just our Council tax is £230 a month and rent is about £760 a week. I guess I could probably charge him some utility bills as well, but I probably won't bother.

So progress is still pretty slow and I'm starting to get frustrated. I'm trying to work out what progress the builder has made in the 19 days since I started this thread. He's finished the steelwork in preparation for the loft conversion which we are doing later down the line and also steelwork for supporting the posi joists that are going in at loft floor. So when I said 19 days ago that he had "done all associated structural work", that wasn't quite right. I didn't realise there were more a couple more steels to go in. He's still not poured the slab for the upper ground floor. He's also done a bit of brickwork that was needed (three courses of standard engineering bricks about 7 linear metres) to separate areas in the ground floor where the screed needed to be different heights either side of the brickwork. Tiles were delivered about two weeks ago, yet no roof work has started yet - not even to the roof of the new front porch which I would have expected would have been a good idea as the weather has been nice and dry recently and it would have kept that area (which is part of the area to have the new slab poured) dry when it starts to rain again in a week or so. Now the steel work has finished, two guys could start installing the chipboard subfloor on the first floor and building the stud walls, whilst the other two guys pour the slab on upper ground floor downstairs - they aren't having to mix their own concrete as this is brought in ready mixed and pumped (or at least that was what happened when the poured the slab at lower ground floor). Posi joists for second floor are due to be delivered next week. Once those go in, is it reasonable for me to say: you now have three separate floors to work on, plus the roof. Plenty of space for you to bring an additional two guys on board so that you can have a team of six rather than four? (From what I can see, the team of four consists of: a foreman who seems to understand how everything needs to be done, but likes to take a lot of breaks; a very hardworking and talented brickie who is also good at joinery; two labourers.)

Today’s Bank of England decision to keep the base rate at 10 basis points and continue QE through the autumn, suggests that the rebound from Covid will continue until at least the end of the year. Beyond that I guess it depends on how well the NHS fares during the winter and whether further lockdowns will be required or not. Hopefully by Easter everything will be more or less back to normal Covid-wise but I suspect the economy will then start to have to face the reality of Brexit, which we have largely been inoculated from due to the grace periods under the Withdrawal Agreement.

+1

@Triassic can I ask where you purchased your kit from?

I think you need to weigh up the possible realistic worst case scenarios: i don’t think you need to worry about something actually failing, as it looks pretty secure and as others have pointed out here, it is unlikely to move anywhere. SEs often over-specify to cover themselves. So the most likely worst case scenario is that it fails building control. So I would just have a chat with your builder and say to him that as it’s not your area of expertise you hired an Se to design it and that you were therefore surprised he deviated from that design, but you don’t want to cause any unnecessary delays to his schedule, so you are okay with it as long as he is sure the BCO is okay with it and that you will be expecting him to fix it if the BCO raises any issues. That way, it is your Builder’s problem if the BCO raises it.

The latter.

I want to more or less replicate the below set-up: except that my situation has some differences to that shown here. Here, the wall on the right has been plastered and painted whereas our wall will be tiled with 17mm clay tiles. The space I have to fit the dishwasher between the sink unit and the bare wall (which is currently bare blockwork) is 640mm. That wall needs to be tiled. Although I won't tile the area of the wall that is covered by the side of the dishwasher or that meets the worktop, as that won't be visible, I do need to tile the rest of the wall - can I just tile directly onto it? I don't have space to affix a wooden baton to the wall to support the worktop (which is about 2300mm long and 650mm deep and probably 30mm thick Caesarstone (i.e. quartz). To try and fit this all in, I'm considering using about eight of these galvanised steel brackets attached to the blockwork to create a support for the worktop, rather than attach a baton to the wall, simply because there is no space for the baton. If I allow 3mm for adhesive, that leaves me with 620 for the dishwasher. The tiles are not very big: 200mm x 65mm clay tiles, although they are installed flush with each other with no grouting and are then sealed with sealant (we are not using these on our splashback, it's just for this wall). @nod what do you think, does 3mm of adhesive sound right for clay tiles this size? That would leave a clear opening of 620mm for the integrated dishwasher. Is this enough? The Bosch dishwasher we have in the rental we are staying in whilst our house is destroyed re-done, is integrated, with a door width of 597mm (even though the spec of the dishwasher describes it as being 600mm wide. If I install it 1.5mm from the sink unit (as it's been installed in our rental) then that leaves me with 21.5mm clearance on the right hand side before I hit the tiles. Is that enough? The space between the (plastered and painted) pictured below is 37mm thick and has been filled with two 18mm decorative end panels. As we are using a DIY Kitchen carcases, but getting our own doors CNC cut from oak staves, instead of these end panels, can I just get the CNC company to cut me a filler piece that is 11.5mm thick, and then make the dishwasher door 10mm wider on that side, thereby making up the 21.5mm gap? Anyone see any problems with that?

Thanks @joth. What router/APs do you recommend? Ideally I need something with more than 4 ethernet ports, as I will likely want to hard wire about 6 devices. Or would I just use a splitter for that?

I’ve had apples for decades. Never had a virus. Never used anti virus software. Now malware... that’s a different beast.

thanks @epsilonGreedy that makes sense. In other news, my browsing issue is definitely a malware issue. My mate came over with his laptop, nothing special, fairly old. We tried browsing from it, so much faster. Any idea how to get rid of malware that bypasses Google when internet searching even though Google is selected as the default search engine. I have tried re-inputting the setting, but it just uses this awful search engine that is so inferior to google.

Labour only is probably the only way to compare prices between competing bids, though I would ask them to include the costs of purchasing the steels, as although Steel has also been susceptible to increases these past months, those will need to be purchased early on in the project so probably the current prices, plus maybe 6% is an accurate estimate for steel. For a project this size, it will probably take at least 6-8 weeks to get through the tender process and narrow it down to just two contenders. You are then closer in time to when the project will be starting and can discuss material prices with the two builders then. We will hopefully have a supply industry that is more back to business as usual by the end of the summer.

Bloody hell. I thought mine was fast and yours is twice as fast!

Just had a look at Zen. Quite impressive that they offer to fix the price for life. In my area they offer up to 73Mbps (with a minimum of 45Mbps guaranteed) for £35 a month, which is the same as I'm paying Virgin for the superfast 200Mb package. How is the Zen router?

I did a factory reset of my router (Rather than just an "unplug it at the mains for 10 sec") and this has fixed the ethernet cables not working. I've also discovered that on my wife's user account on our mac, she has a lot of malware. I tried to remove it but struggled. So I wonder if that is in some way affecting browsing speed. It would make sense if the browser issue was only on her user account, but it's on both. Once I fix the malware, I think the next step will be to buy a better router, rather than to switch to A&A or Zen. Interested to understand why Virgin can offer speeds that are so much faster than Zen or A&A.

All Duravit rimless: Duravit ME Starck, and then a slightly smaller D2 Happy for the under stairs toilet, and the slightly bigger P3 Comforts for my big bottom. i tested all of them at CP Hart (not properly tested, but whilst wearing Lycra I sat on the seat for a bit) and they were all pretty comfortable. Including the expensive soft close slim toilet seats, worked out about £480 each in the CP Hart sale. I think if you push hard, CP Hart will give you those prices outside of sale season too.

I think that test actually runs 1920 pings, as is not stopped yet and I see the window is called “ping bbc.co.uk - 80x24”. Results seem to be getting slower. Just saw lots of high teens a couple of 23s and a 24. These are all milliseconds though so maybe I am just being ocd.

It must be slightly different on a Mac as that command returns more than just 4 results (so far it’s returned 188, I guess it will stop at some power of 2. All the times are between 11 and 23 seconds, though the 23 was pretty rare. On another site I got latency of 40, but not sure whether that was loaded or unloaded (or what the difference is).

Yes, that was on the upload test.

Just tried on my phone (connected to wifi), and got this (which is weirdly slow for me):

Just tried that. Funnily enough, it isn’t able to complete the test in the advertised 30seconds. It runs download speed test, then upload speed test (giving numbers similar to those quoted above) then it just stays on the same test screen (ie the upload speed test) without progressing. It’s been like that for 4 minutes now, but it’s not frozen because the little circle on the speed dial is quivering between 19.9 and 20. No VPN. Could it be some sort of malware in the browser?

Just keep in mind you might lose. I filed an appeal after spending £££ on a really good planning consultant who thought I had good prospects on the appeal but recommended I file a back up application as well. She did a great job on the appeal. But... we lost for the most random reason: inspector pretty much agreed with all of our points, but for some reason took issue with the style of windows we had chosen for our rear elevation - not a point that had been raised by any neighbour or something directly raised by the LPA, whose objection to our scheme was mainly on the basis that the additions we were making to the rear, were not in keeping with the “street scene”. What was most surprising about this was that if he had studied the scheme more carefully, he would have seen we were installing crittall style windows which imitate the genuine crittall windows that would have been put in to the original 1930s house. I probably could have taken the matter to judicial review, but ultimately we decided it wasn’t worth it.

It’s all very well having download speeds of 220Mbps and uploads speeds of almost 20Mbps, but when everything else about the connection is awful, I’m starting to doubt my loyalty to Virgin Media. In the last three properties we’ve lived in, we have always had Virgin. They have always offered the fastest packages for our postcode and in my naivety I thought that was all that mattered. The last couple of years, I’ve noticed their customer service has got worse and worse, prices have gone up, and I’ve recently learned about the importance of latency. Virgin is pretty poor for latency, so particularly when browsing the internet, the responsiveness of the browser is bad, and i forget very quickly that I have such high speeds. The other gripe I have is that the router is generally not very unreliable. It needs rebooting every few days and when it is rebooted it often fails to connect to my devices and needs a further reboot to get it working again. Very frustrating. Today I discovered the Ethernet connections are not working. It’s only 6 months old. Pathetic. I will try a factory reset later. I now need to start thinking about a new internet connection for our actual house and the default “I’ll get Virgin” is now very much in doubt. According to the postcode lookup on Andrews and Arnold site, we are 1670m from the nearest fibre cabinet and therefore the fastest speeds they anticipate we will get with a FTTC connection through them, is 55-80 MBps, with uploads of about 14Mbps, for £55 a month. That is considerably more than I pay for Virgin, but A&A claim to have much better reliability, lower latency and a very good router. Not really sure why Virgin is the only company that can offer such high speeds (G-network, hyperoptic and Three’s 5G aren’t available on my street), but if that really is the case, I’m wondering whether it makes sense to try A& A on the basis that increased reliability, lower latency and a better router together merit significantly lower speeds. Has anybody left Virgin to for an “alternative” provider such as A&A? I know a while back A&A got some fairly good write ups on this forum; is that still the case? (My main internet use is video calls during the day and streaming Netflix on two devices in the evening. We have also considered that in the future we might want a 4K TV and to upgrade to Netflix 4k, but even that only needs 25Mbps and we would never have two devices watching 4k at the same time.)

My understanding is that there is no legal definition of “finished” and that it will vary from Council to Council as to how they apply the concept of finished. Ultimately, the Building Regs department is separate (and doesn’t really talk to) the PD or planning departments. So whilst a building regs certificate is useful evidence of something being finished, I’m not sure we will be able to get that before we have to start our loft conversion. So we are just going to finish the external shell of the ground and first floor, take plenty of photos that evidence that it is all finished from the outside, and then serve our building regs commencement notice in respect of the loft and start the loft. This will be about 8 months after we served the BR commencement notice in respect of the scheme approved by planning, which actually coincides with the builder’s original estimate for doing the whole project. Do you think we are taking a big risk?

I have been given contrary advice to what @DevilDamo has said in this thread. My planning consultant told me that after our extension (which we got approved by way of a planning application) is finished, we can convert our loft under PD, as long as no aspect of the loft conversion touches any aspect of the extension obtained under planning. So I would have thought that it is fine for @nfoote to add bits to his roof under PD as long as he starts those bits after he has finished his extension.